FACILITATING A NEW UNDERSTANDING OF BELONGING

LinkedIn, the company that is connecting the world’s professionals to make them more productive and successful. It is a name that’s synonymous with career growth, and has over 562 million users in more than 200 countries worldwide.

WHY WE WORKED TOGETHER

As part of their mission to help professionals become better, LinkedIn is well on its way to establishing itself as a leader in the learning & development field. Which means, their L&D team is growing. We led LATE NITE ART at LinkedIn’s annual learning summit, which brought together executives from their global training team. 40 people, from the United States, Canada, Dublin, Singapore, and India. Our goal: to push the learning and creative edges of the LinkedIn L&D team, so they can create cutting edge, relevant content for their end users.

WHAT WE CREATED

With growth, building culture becomes an imperative. For LinkedIn, the company is creating their culture around the theme of DIBs - Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging. And leading this initiative is the L&D team. We designed a custom LATE NITE ART workshop, which explored what it means to build learning content that fits the practice of DIBs. Also, what does it mean for someone to embody these values on a daily basis?

Given our own mission, our task was cut out for us, because we had to make DIBs experiential. And that was exciting. Our two-hour session was chock full of embodied learning. Our client really wanted us to challenge our participants. For that, we used storytelling and movement as our primary tools. This, to help our group experience empathy, and connect across differences.

HOW IT SUCCEEDED

This was a team that was ready for everything. The first thing that struck us as we were facilitating, was that this group listened deeply, with compassion. We:

Helped the participants identify and address the unique D&I challenges each of the executives manage, in the geographical/ cultural context of their own teams.

Designed a section where each participant received support for a key leadership problem they have. This has now become an app where other teams crowdsource ideas.

Created a new understanding of belonging for this team, by demonstrating how to help people build quick connections - asking meaningful questions, mirroring emotions/body language, sharing personal stories, and validating differences.

The LATE NITE ART team was professional, prepared, and took care of every detail. I really appreciated how they wove insights about our team into their facilitation throughout the experience — it felt like they “got” us. I wouldn’t hesitate to use LATE NITE ART again!